Didion got the book title from a line of a W.B. Yeats poem. These lines really are poignant today:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned,
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”

Well, I don’t see any Second Coming on the way… I wish there were, but things just don’t work that way. This poem was actually written after World War I, and as we know, things only got worse from there… which is why Didion referenced it directly in the title of this collection during the 60’s. Indeed she says those first few lines were stuck in her head.  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming 

The book also starts with a curious Peggy Lee quote: “I learned courage from Buddha, Jesus, Lincoln, Einstein, and Cary Grant.” Gotta do a deep dive on that one at some point!

In the preface, Didion talks about the essay that shares the name of the book, and how it was the first time her feedback was universally missing the point of what she wrote. In fact, she writes: “I went to San Francisco because I had not been able to work in some months, had been paralyzed by the conviction that writing was an irrelevant act, that the world as I had understood it no longer existed. If I was to work again at all, it would be necessary for me to come to terms with disorder. That was why the piece was important to me.” 

So yes, it was popular, but people thought she was just writing about something entirely besides the point. This is how I feel, but in my case, I don’t even get much feedback besides silence. 

Joan Didion on Being a Journalist: “My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive, and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does. That is one last thing to remember: writers are always selling somebody out.”

On Her Essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream”

Honestly, this look at life in the San Bernardino Valley of the 60s sounds like a great novel in itself! It’s a story about an unhappy marriage, a brutal summer, and an apparent murder! Now that is a great story! Of course this one is not fiction. But the way that Didion tells it, it’s a perfectly constructed narrative with amazing characterization and level of detail. Oh and it seems like a double homicide… this trial was a huge deal.

I adore this line: “In some ways it was the conventional clandestine affair in a place like San Bernardino, a place where little is bright or graceful, where it is routine to misplace the future and ebay to start looking for it in bed.” That is just brilliant.

I think everyone these days long ago misplaced their futures and bed is about the only place they find much of anything worth living for… and blabbermouths are everywhere these days. The crazy thing about this story, is that all Lucy Miller had to do was let her suicidal husband finish himself off and she’d get enough insurance money to pay off his debts and live comfortably for awhile. Nope, she had to go and take matters into her own hands… how few people ever settle for the “easy way out.” 

Lucy is, of course, charged with her husband’s murder at the very least… and escapes the death penalty thanks to having been pregnant at the time and gets life instead. Her lover’s wife’s death is no longer investigated… since they’re pretty sure she did it too and there’s not much point in trying her again anyway. 

What’s funny is, as the prosecutor said, “It wasn’t a very interesting murder as murders go.” I’d agree with that, but this is where the power of  narrative really shines here. It’s all about the narrative… and oh boy, is it more about the narrative than ever these days!

In the end, her lawyer friend did OK and got happily remarried. “Some people around San Bernardino say that Arthwell Hayton suffered; others say that he did not suffer at all. Perhaps he did not, for time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew.” If Lucy did kill his wife, it worked out for him in the end. Really sad, but yeah, humans really are just born murderers happy to do the dirty deed to satisfy one’s lust; as what we often call “love” (and Didion uses those quotations around the word too) is really just lust. Most of what we call “love” really is just limerance taken too far. 

Really great essay, proving that it’s the narrative that is more important than the facts of the case that provides such sensational entertainment, because deep down, we all want to kill at some point or another. Human beings are such sweet, wonderful paradoxes of evil and “good” just walking around ready to snap at a moment’s notice…

On “John Wayne: A Love Story”

This essay is about the first time Joan ever saw John Wayne in a film; she was eight. And this line pretty much sums up the thesis of the essay: 

Joan Didion on John Wayne: “I tell you this neither in a spirit of self-revelation nor as an exercise in total recall, but simply to demonstrate that when John Wayne rode through my childhood, and perhaps through yours, he determined forever the shape of certain of our dreams.”

I don’t know how much of that dialogue she wrote was real from the backstage of making Katie Elder, but it was a pretty cool read, nonetheless.

On “Where the Kissing Never Stops” 

This essay is about Joan Baez. Key line here: “Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not to be.” Sounds like what happens to young Disney stars…

So the stink here for the well-known singer is that she’s a known anti-establishment figure, as well, which I knew vaguely already. The issue that the unkind folks of Carmel Valley are having is her school called the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence. Shows you just how stupid some of these Valley people are… and they haven’t gotten any better!

The concept of the school honestly sounds pretty awesome. Teaching people to be loving and kind and read really interesting books? Sign me up! But no, this school is a threat to everybody apparently… because you know, we need war and suffering and awful shit! It’s America goddamn it!

This is incredibly beautiful, these thoughts from Joan Baez about ‘waiting on the eve of destruction’ – I’m copying them in entirety.

“My life is a crystal teardrop. There are snowflakes falling in the teardrop and little figures trudging around in slow motion. If I were to look into the teardrop for the next million years, I might never find out who the people are, and what they are doing.

Sometimes I get lonesome for a storm. A full-blown storm where everything changes. The sky goes through four days in an hour, the trees wail, little animals skitter in the mud and everything gets dark and goes completely wild. But it’s really God – playing music in his favorite cathedral in heaven – shattering stained glass – playing a gigantic organ – thundering on the keys – perfect harmony – perfect joy.”

Whoa, that’s some word pictures… Ira Sandperl is a fascinating figure, too, and hey Allen Ginsberg makes a cameo! Pretty neat essay. 

On “Comrade Laski”

“Comrade Laski” is about an actual Communist that Joan knew personally. Didion remarks that she “was interested not in the revolution but in the revolutionary.” Fair enough. As I would be also. 

This is quite a paragraph from Didion: 

“As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.” 

I’m not sure I even have faith in History anymore. (Herstory is better!) Never thought of History as an opiate, but yeah, it most certainly is!

And this is why I nor Joan Didion ever had an ideology. “The world Michael Laski had constructed for himself was one of labyrinthine intricacy and immaculate clarity, a world made meaningful not only by high purpose but by external and internal threats, intrigues and apparatus, an immutably ordered world in which things mattered.”

…do things really even matter?

Anyway, the end of the essay is eye-opening. Didion visited the Workers International Bookstore on a day where the members of the party had been out peddling the People’s Voice paper. It was not a good day, as it turns out… as Comrade Simmons tells Laski: “It’s always bad the day before welfare and unemployment checks arrive.” So, you see their target audience.

Didion closes with this: “You see what the world of Michael Laski is: a minor but perilous triumph of being over nothingness.” Not snarky at all! Also true.

On Howard Hughes and “7000 Romaine”

“7000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38” refers to a building which belongs to Howard Hughes, and it’s one that Didion drives by often. 

After mentioning most of the building’s windows are boarded up and yet there’s a welcome mat outside the front door:..

“Actually no one is welcome, for 7000 Romaine belongs to Howard Hughes, and the door is locked. That the Hughes ‘communication center’ should lie here in the dull sunlight of Hammett-Chandler country is one of those circumstances that satisfy one’s suspicion that life is indeed a scenario, for the Hughes empire has been in our time the only industrial complex in the world — involving, over the years, machinery manufacture, foreign oil-tool subsidiaries, a brewery, two airlines, immense real-estate holdings, a major motion-picture studio, an an electronics and missile operation– run by a man whose modus operandi most closely resembles that of a character in the Big Sleep.”

I knew Hughes was a big deal back then, and an infamous recluse. But this is quite the setup. My favorite phrase here, though, is, “one of those circumstances that satisfy one’s suspicion that life is indeed a scenario…” 

I love how Didion says how Hughes doesn’t make “transactions” but rather “missions.” He doesn’t have “associates” he has “adversaries.”

Joan Didion on the tales about Howard Hughes: “The stories are endless, infinitely familiar, traded by the faithful like baseball cards, fondled until they fray around the edges and blur into the apocryphal.”

What is definitely true, and I’ve heard this before, Hughes paid people weekly checks just to work for no one else and always be on standby, because he’d make his moves in the middle of the night. Talk about paranoia. And I never realized just how much of Vegas he owned in 1967, although I’m aware he owned a lot of it.

This is a great passage: “Why do we like those stories so? Why do we tell them over and over? Why have we made a folk hero of a man who is the antithesis of all our official heroes, a haunted millionaire out of the West, trailing a legend of desperation and power and white sneakers? But then we have always done that. Our favorite people and our favorite stories become so not by any inherent virtue, but because they illustrate something deep in the grain, something unadmitted. Shoeless Joe Jackson, Warren Gamaliel Harding, the Titanic: how the mighty are fallen. Charles Lindbergh, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Marilyn Monroe: the beautiful and damned. And Howard Hughes. That we have made a hero of Howard Hughes tells us something interesting about ourselves, something only dimly remembered, tells us that the secret point of money and power in America is neither the things that money can buy nor power for power’s sake (Americans are uneasy with their possessions, guilty about power, all of which is difficult for Europeans to perceive because they are themselves so truly materialistic, so versed in the uses of power), but absolute personal freedom, mobility, privacy.  It is the instinct which drove America to the Pacific, all through the nineteenth century, the desire to be able to find a restaurant open in case you want a sandwich, to be a free agent, live by one’s own rules.”

Frankly, in 2025, this is easier to do than ever. Pretty soon, you can have AI make all your appearances for you online. If you have the money, you can create smoke and mirrors to project any personality or narrative you want. Or you just have to be clever enough to look more well off than you are, just so you can make enough to subsist on while you move about entirely anonymously and unimpeded by the restrictions that society puts on individuals out of a sense of “order” or “morality.” Or even “mortality.”

The last paragraph of this essay is particularly awesome, and very long. I don’t really want to retype the whole thing. So I’ll just note highlights.

“Of course we do not admit that. The instinct is socially suicidal, and because we recognize that this is so we have develop workable ways of saying one thing and believing quite another.” That is more accurate of people today than ever before I think.

The next part I want to take note of: “A long time ago, Lionel Trilling pointed out what he called ‘the fatal separation’ between ‘the idea of our educated liberal class and the deep places of the imagination.’ ‘I mean only,’ he wrote, ‘that our educated class has a ready if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning and international cooperation… Those beliefs do great credit to those who hold them. Yet it is a comment, if not on our beliefs then on our way of holding them, that not a single first-rate writer has emerged to deal with these ideas, and the emotions that are constant with them, in a great literary way.’” Has that ever come to pass? Is this what I’ve been trying to do all along?

“Officially we admire men who exemplify these ideas. We admire the Adlai Stevenson character, the rational man, the enlightened man, the man not dependent upon the potentially psychopathic mode of action. Among rich men, we officially admire Paul Mellon, a socially responsible inheritor in the European mold. There has always been that divergence between our official and our unofficial heroes. It is impossible to think of Howard Hughes without seeing the apparently bottomless gulf between what we say we want and what we do want, between what we officially admire and secretly desire, between, in the largest sense, the people we marry and the people we love. In a nation which increasingly appears to prize social virtues, Howard Hughes remains not merely antisocial but grandly, brilliantly, surpassingly, asocial. He is the last private man, the dream we no longer admit.”

I’m fairly certain Hughes isn’t the last private man. We’ve had a few since then, but not to the extreme degree of Hughes, for sure.

On “California Dreaming” 

The 1960’s sound like such a bizarre and fascinating place. Yet another sort of ‘school’ created outside of the educational system. This time, it’s Robert M. Hutchins founding the Fund for the Republic, which now has morphed into the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. Hutchins seeks out people who he “deems controversial, stimulating, and, perhaps above, all, cooperative, or our kind.” 

It’s a very interesting collaborative effort… and whereas today it seems people build Discord servers to trade cards and figure out strategies to break video games in order to beat them quickly as possible… Back then, it seems such groups were figuring out how to ask better questions and find answers to pressing issues of the day… issues we are STILL DEALING WITH in 2025. 

One member, Harry Ashmore, refers to the group as “highly skilled public-relations experts.” Isn’t that all we have in the media and elected offices now?

Didion on the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions: “I have long been interested in the Center’s rhetoric, which has about it the kind of ectoplasmic generality that always makes me sense I am on the track of the real souffle, the genuine American kitsch… The Center is the most perfectly indigenous cultural phenomenon since the Encyclopedia Britannica’s Syntopicon, which sets forth the ‘The 102 Great Ideas of Western Man’ and which we also owe to Robert, or Dr. Hutchins.”

So Didion actually gets to sit on a few sessions of the center. They warn her about the big table: “‘The talk there is pretty high-powered.’” Oh how these men always underestimated Joan Didion!

The center actually tape records their sessions and produces many papers that plenty of people are happy to read, and some teachers even use them for current-events courses.

Didion writes: “The notion that providing useful papers for eighth-grade current-events classes and reading for regular teenagers might not be at all times compatible with establishing ‘a true intellectual community’ (another Hutchins aim) would be considered, at the Center, a downbeat and undemocratic cavil. ‘People are entitled to learn what we’re thinking,’ someone there told me. The place is in fact avidly anti-intellectual, the deprecatory use of words like ‘egghead’ and ‘ivory tower’ reaching heights matched only in a country-club locker room.’ Hutchins takes pains to explain that by ‘an intellectual community’ he does not mean a community ‘whose members regard themselves as intellectuals’ Harry Ashmore frets particularly that ‘men of affairs’ may fail to perceive the Center’s ‘practical utility.’ Hutchins likes to quote Adlai Stevenson on this point: ‘The Center can be thought of as a kind of national insurance plan, a way of making certain that we will deserve better and better.’” 

Huh, this sounds familiar… It sounds like university “education” in 2025. You get a degree, then you deserve to be able to bully people who don’t have one… Ugh.

The remarks Didion makes about the Center’s funding is also very insightful: “Its own way costs about a million dollars a year. Some twelve thousand contributors provide the million a year, and it helps if they can think of a gift to the Center not as a gift to support some visionaries who never met a payroll but ‘as an investment [tax-exempt] in the preservation of our free way of life.’” What that really means is, the way of life that allows the more fortunate among us to run roughshod over everyone else. Fun times.

Also this: “It helps, too, to present the donor with a fairly broad-stroke picture of how the Center is besieged by the forces of darkness, and in this effort the Center has had an invaluable, if unintentional, ally in the Santa Barbara John Birch Society. ‘You can’t let the fascists drive them out of town,’ I was advised by an admirer of the Center.”

The sad thing, there really WERE fascists to be concerned about back then. The problem is that the alternatives, places like the Center, weren’t all that much better in their bankruptcy of humanist principles.

I love this, and honestly, this sounds like most university presses today, even the ones who occasionally publish something useful. “Actually, even without the Birch Society as a foil, Hutchins has evolved the E=mc2 of all fund-raising formulae. The Center is supported on the same principle as a vanity press. People who are in a position to contribute large sums of money are encouraged to participate in clarifying the basic issues.”

And the liberal establishment continues to do just this very thing. Hell, even the right-wing institutions have begun to create their own “Centers” and “Institutes” to spread their dangerous rhetoric to the youth of the world. We’ve globalized being high on your own supply to such a degree that those taking office in many cases are incompetent and delusional. Many of these organizations that claim to be making the world better are, in fact, just filling hearts and minds with helium and watching them float away. Fun times.

On ‘Marrying Absurd’ 

This essay is about quick and dirty weddings in Las Vegas, which is something we still very much have today.

I love how Didion describes Vegas: 

“Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification, a place the tone of which is set by mobsters and call girls and ladies’ room attendants with amyl nitrite poppers in their uniform pockets. Almost everyone notes that there is no ‘time’ in Las Vegas, no night and no day and no past and no future (no Las Vegas casino, however, has taken the obliteration of the ordinary time sense quite so far as Harold’s Club in Reno, which for awhile issued, at odd intervals in the day and night, mimeographed ‘bulletins’ carrying news from the world outside); neither is there any logical sense of where one is…”

On Vegas being in the middle of a vast hostile desert, “This geographical implausibility reinforces the sense that what happens there has no connection with ‘real’ life; Nevada cities like Reno and Carson are ranch towns, Western Towns, places behind which there is some historical imperative. Bus Las Vegas seems to exist only in the eye of the beholder. All of which makes it an extraordinarily stimulating and interesting place, but an odd one in which to want to wear a candlelight satin Priscilla of Boston wedding dress with Chantilly lace insets, tapered sleeves and a detachable modified train… And yet the Las Vegas wedding business seems to appeal to precisely that impulse.”

And it’s still going in 2025.

This is cutting about the wedding chapels all competing with one another: “All of these services, like most others in Las Vegas… are offered twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, presumably on the premise that marriage, like craps, is a game to be played when the table seems hot.”  Phew.

Joan Didion “On Self-Respect”

This is a brilliant opening sentence: 

“Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.”

The instigating incident here was Joan not being elected to Phi Beta Kappa at 19… and while the reason was obvious, she didn’t have the grades, she was so dejected. “It was a matter of misplaced self-respect,” she concludes.

“I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others.”

I’ll be honest, I didn’t get that reference. Then I realized, oh he’s the protagonist in Crime and Punishment. Interestingly, the name derives from the Russian word meaning “Schismatic”

Google puts it thusly: “Raskolnikov’s character is defined by a deep internal conflict, showcasing traits of a cold, intellectual, and arrogant “extraordinary” man who believes he can transcend morality, alongside a compassionate, yet alienated and alienated self who helps others in need. He suffers from an inferiority complex disguised by arrogance, leading to a narcissistic belief in his superiority and right to commit crime, yet this is contrasted by his subsequent paranoia, guilt, and mental breakdown after the murder. His name itself, derived from “schism,” signifies his divided nature, a struggle between his rationalistic theory and his innate human empathy.”

I’m no Raskolnikov, but I’m more like him than I’d like to admit. Although I’m certainly not a narcissist, I have indeed been arrogant. But in most of these scenarios in which I let arrogance get the best of me, it turned out I had been correct in my assumptions. I don’t think I can transcend morality, but rather transcend people’s extremely limited view of what morality even is supposed to look like.

Anyway, this may be my favorite Didion essay thus far. 

“I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale.”

I love this sentence: “To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.”

“Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect.”

“To do with self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that details one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening.”

This is my life.

“In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues.”

This is an incredibly relevant passage. 

“The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.”

Yeah, and it’s interesting to think, hey, no one wants to take responsibility for any shit now, do they? And to think, this collection was published in May of 1968.

“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked, within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses.”

Discriminate has such a different and unfortunate connotation now. She of course means “to recognize and understand the difference between things (to distinguish)” not “to treat a person or group unfairly based on prejudice, rather than merit (to show partiality).” Today, it’s often used in the latter context. 

“On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notions of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give.”

And this is what the Information Age of Social Media has done to people… people only know how to do the second definition of discrimination rather than the first. People live to be flattered. Empathy is mostly imaginary. The willingness to give is out of some false sense of charity because there is always a perceived benefit to “give aways” and “donations” that is not at all truly self-sacrifice, but rather to be part of a greater imaginary whole. More like a hole.

“At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.”

There you go. That’s what’s wrong with people in 2025. Also, this particular essay was written in 1961. 

But yeah, this is our modern way of life. And it sucks. Because no one has self-respect, which is something I’ve been saying for some time now. I’ve been telling people for years that they lack it, only to be cast out and told to commit unspeakable acts upon myself.

On “I Can’t Get That Monster Out of My Mind” 

The title of this essay comes from a line of dialogue from a forgettable monster movie. Joan herself doesn’t remember what it was called. But, she makes great use of it.

“It is a useful line, and one that frequently occurs to me when I catch the tone in which a great many people write or talk about Hollywood. In the popular imagination, the American motion-picture industry still represents a kind of mechanical monster, programmed to stifle and destroy all that is interesting and worthwhile and ‘creative’ in the human spirit.”

I think we’ve been spoiled by all the amazing films of the mid-to-late 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and early 2000’s. Still, I have to agree with her that so many Hollywood films from back then mostly suck ass. The European ones are great, but they’re usually in French or German or something. And many of those older great European films are remade in English, eventually… sadly, rarely as well.

Now this is, really, very relevant…

“One problem is that American directors, with a handful of exceptions, are not much interested in style; they are at heart didactic. Ask what they plan to do with their absolute freedom, with their chance to make a personal statement, and they will pick an ‘issue,’ a ‘problem.’ The ‘issues’ they pick are generally no longer real issues, if indeed they ever were – but I think it a mistake to attribute this to any calculated venality, to any conscious playing it safe… Call it instead – this apparent calculation about what ‘issues’ are not safe – an absence of imagination, a sloppiness of mind in some ways encouraged by a comfortable feedback from the audience, from the bulk of the reviewers, and from some people who ought to know better.”

Huh, isn’t this ‘wokeness’? This sounds frighteningly similar to the hot garbage coming out left and right from every studio imaginable. You might get one or two decent films out of a thousand, like Didion herself was suggesting, but otherwise, they’re still nominally being profitable so why put in any more effort when the formula is working, right?

The thing is, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being didactic in general. That meaning being ‘designed or intended to teach’ or ‘intended to convey instruction and information in addition to serving another purpose (such as pleasure and entertainment)’. But the third definition is the one I think she means here, “making moral observations (usually disapprovingly): intended to teach proper or moral behavior.” It’s these morality plays that make up the core of being ‘woke’ and apparently it was an issue in 1964!

Didion did NOT have a high opinion of Dr. Strangelove, which is funnily enough one of the few films from that era people still DO have a high opinion of…

Joan Didion ‘On Morality’

The morality that Joan is talking about is not something specific, like obviously leaving a body on the side of the highway after an accident where coyotes can come and eat it does seem pretty immoral. The kind of morality she’s discussing is this:

“I am talking, of course, about the kind of social code that is sometimes called, usually pejoratively, ‘wagon-train morality.’ In fact that is precisely what it is. For better or worse, we are what we learned as children: my own childhood was illuminated by graphic litanies of grief awaiting those who failed in their loyalties to each other.” 

She then brings up the Donner-Reed Party in particular. 

“In brief, we heard such stories as cautionary tales, and they still suggest the only kind of ‘morality’ that seems to me to have any but the most potentially mendacious meaning.”

Mendacious, now that’s a word: “given to or characterized by deception or falsehood or divergence from absolute truth.”

This sounds familiar.

To give some context, Didion is writing this essay while staying in Death Valley and it’s 119 degrees outside.

“You are quite possibly impatient with me, by now; I am talking, you want to say, about a ‘morality’ so primitive that it scarcely deserves the name, a code that has as its point only survival, not the attainment of the ideal good. Exactly. Particularly out here tonight in this country so ominous and terrible that to live in it is to live with antimatter, it is difficult to believe that ‘the good’ is a knowable quantity.”

I’d add that people use ‘morality’ as a justification to do things that keep them in charge, to justify their own role in a broken system.

Didion talks about the crazy stories she hears about from the desert. “There is some sinister hysteria in the air out here tonight, some hint of the monstrous perversion to which any human idea can come.” I think the heat literally makes people crazy.

She quotes Lionel Trilling, as she’s done before, who once wrote, “We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes… Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.”

Didion adds to this remark: “That the ethic of conscience is intrinsically insidious seems scarcely a revelatory point, but it is one raise with increasing infrequency; even those who do raise it tend to segue with troubling readiness into the quite contradictory position that the ethic of conscience is dangerous when it is ‘wrong,’ and admirable when it is ‘right.’”

Her conclusion: 

“You see I want to be quite obstinate about insisting that we have no way of knowing – beyond that fundamental loyalty to the social code – what is “right” and what is “wrong,” what is ‘good’ and what ‘evil.’ I dwell so upon this because the most disturbing aspect of ‘morality’ seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything: they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work. Of course we would all like to ‘believe’ in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, things have gotten done. But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why…”

“…It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with ‘morality.’ Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.” 

As it turns out, we were mighty close. This whole essay is particularly relevant to read in 2025. As I was saying to Emily, I think things have only gotten so bad because we no longer have quite the voices of reason we had in guys like Richard Dawkins, Carl Sagan, Chris Hutchins, etc. There are many, many more respected voices who simply are no longer with us. I think there are voices on their level out there (Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye comes to mind), but they’re not getting heard over the static of social media and the tribal nature of the attention economy. All the great minds are being sucked up into AI or politics or God knows what. They aren’t deployed to serve the better interests of society. 

I think if anything is a moral imperative, it’s as simple as agreeing to disagree and talk things out. There are good people on both sides of the partisan political floor and even the “bad” people aren’t as misguided as they first appear; it’s just their apparent solutions only cause more harm than good. And it’s on both sides. But most people get caught in the middle and are too easily swayed by emotion to see the game for what it is. All you do is stop playing; get off social media, learn how to read critically, and figure out what it is you actually are good at, not playing at whatever will “make you a living” because the way things are going, unless you are in a necessary trade or happen to be in with the right crowd, you’re going to get royally screwed over these next few years.